Core Process Psychotherapy 

 

 

  

 

Life can unfold unpredictably, and psychotherapy offers a space to slow down and explore what is happening, how we feel about ourselves, our relationships and our lives. People seek out psychotherapy for many reasons. It may be through a sense of acute struggle, finding it hard to cope with stressful or traumatic events, an experience of depression, anxiety, facing grief and loss, or facing challenges in relationships. Sometimes our capacity for relationship may feel limited by what has happened in the past and psychotherapy can help us to bring attention to these impacts in the present and to feel resourced to respond differently. It may also be struggling with the bigger questions of life and seeking a greater sense of meaning. 

Mindfulness Based Core Process Psychotherapy is a gentle and holistic approach that brings attention to both body and mind. It draws on the developmental understanding of western psychotherapy and on the Buddhist wisdom tradition. Contemporary neuroscience has shed light on how much of the history of our relationships is held in our bodies and how we have developed in response to life experience. Buddhism tells us that much of our suffering arises from how we close ourselves off from the flow of life in an attempt to avoid pain. This is natural to us as human beings because we don’t wish to suffer and it also tends to create more of the same.  

Mindfulness based psychotherapy focuses our awareness on the quality of what is happening in the present moment. Bringing kindness and mindful attention to experience creates space to explore the emotions, sensations, perceptions and the underlying beliefs below our conscious awareness. Staying with our felt sense even momentarily and enquiring into how things are for us interrupts what may be a habitual rejection of unwanted parts of ourselves and our lived experience. Space for the possibility of something new is created if we can build a tolerance for being with the full range of emotions, bringing attention to what feels resourcing within ourselves as well as working with what feels challenging. This helps to recover a sense of our own wholeness, which is the ‘Core’ that we recognise in Core Process as always being present underneath the difficulty.